Can spatial practice become a form of research? This innovative practice-driven PhD programme invites applications from architects, artists, filmmakers and other interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners dealing critically with issues of spatial analysis and politics who would like to develop long-term practice-based research projects. The PhD groups we have put together operate in an innovative and robust exchange and a peer-to-peer mode.

Can spatial practice become a form of research? Might the notion of architecture be expanded to engage with questions of culture, politics, conflict and human rights? This new and innovative research centre brings together architects, urbanists, filmmakers, curators and other cultural practitioners from around the world to work collaboratively around questions of this kind.

In jointly approaching Marxism and anarchism to draw from them intellectual and strategic resources for contemporary anti-capitalism can we avoid the tiresome alternative between the production of sterile doctrinal hybrids, on the one hand, and the neurotic revisiting of the primal scene of separation, on the other? The wager of this talk is that turning to anarchist and Marxist lineages in geographical thought might help us to avoid the dull commonplaces of polemic – whether this will define new frontlines or forge unexpected alliances, I leave open.